Into the Void

I have been looking into a device called a Perkl-Light Energy Spa. Unfortunately the proprietor has a serious dislike of scientists. I don’t know if I can purchase the device from someone who has such disdain for empiricism. I could deal with it if he at least provided some background on how the device works. The implication is that the device likely hasn’t been tested and optimized.

I sent him a note.

I am an electrical engineer and a reiki master.

Your epistemological rant is a little offputting.

Reiki is about being a receiver of sorts, feeling Ki in the Chakras and the aura and situating the hands to help it move. It’s not a talent, it is a human sense that we all have but many ignore. You are surrounded by radio waves every day, but without a radio you can’t detect them. Before radios were developed, radio waves coming in from space met the definition of “Subtle Energies” that the New Agers like to bandy about. Does it make sense to state that radio waves don’t exist?

Science is a method for testing empirical data. If I can’t detect Ki with scientific tools, that doesn’t mean Ki doesn’t exist, it means I need different tools.

As an example, an electronic device called an operational amplifier or OpAmp typically has a minimum frequency of about 0.5 Hz (cycles per second). Low-frequency energies aren’t detectable with OpAmps. If you are measuring a patient’s brainwaves with a tool called an electroencephalogram (EEG) while he is being put under deep anesthesia, it is possible for the brainwaves to become too low to be measured. There isn’t a doctor in the world who would tell you that the anesthetized patient is dead, not sleeping.

One attribute of empirical knowledge is that by taking better and better measurements and improving my hypothesis, I can question authority and expand the horizons of human knowledge.

I tried asking questions in church and was told to leave and not come back. This experience taught me to reject exclusionary dogma, and that is precisely why scientific enquiry appeals to me.

Did the Perkl-Light Energy Spa come into existence in its finished, perfect form, or did you have to engage in a scientific process of testing, modification and retesting?

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

This would be funny if it weren’t so plausible.

“Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work,” Carson said. “What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that ‘gravity waves’ and ‘gravitons’ are just secular words for ‘God can do whatever He wants.’”
–Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry.

I have to give a speech on evolution…help? – Yahoo! Answers

My nephew would tell you that a shark doesn’t turn into a chair.

Darwin and Wallace were the first guys to write about evolution.

Darwin got his ideas while traveling around the world and seeing all kinds of animals. The ship was called the “Beagle.” You’ll want to talk about Galapagos Island, where he saw different species of birds in a place so far from the continent that they had to have all come from one ancestor. He thought that their beaks were shaped by what food their ancestors ate. Seeds vs. berries vs. bugs, etc. Don’t forget the tortoises.

There are different theories of how evolution occurs.

**Lamarck** said that species evolve because acquired traits are passed down through the generations. Like giraffes stretching their necks up to get leaves makes their offspring have longer necks. (not true)

Darwin believed that evolution was a slow process of population drifting in response to the environment. The average height of a giraffe changes each generation because the short ones all died. (closer, but not quite)

Basically, evolution occurs when something in the environment – Nature – kills off certain animals and let others live. So if the short-necked giraffes always died there would only be taller giraffes left to reproduce. But the next valley over the trees might be really short so the tall giraffes have trouble reaching down and after a couple of generations only short giraffes are left. So now there are two different animals. This is called “Natural Selection.”

Darwin, like most people of his time, believed that offspring were a blend of their parents traits, like a black cat and a white cat have grey kittens and after that all kittens are grey. (not true) He had trouble believing his own theory, and waited many years to publish it. Actually, he published it only after he found out that Wallace had the same ideas.

**Mendel** came up with modern genetics, where there are dominant and recessive genes. So black cats can have white kittens, orange tabby kittens, and black kittens.

Another theory is that small mutations – like birth defects – might make an animal better suited. Maybe a horse had a long-necked colt that could eat from taller trees so it survived. After enough generations the mutations add up until the horse looks like a giraffe. Obviously some mutations don’t help at all, or even kill. It’s random. Some folks can’t handle randomness – everything has to be planned in advance or they freak out.

Still another theory is that small changes aren’t good enough – there had to be a miracle to change one species to another. They always say that the eye had to be a miracle because it’s so complex, but they forget to tell you about lizards with light-sensing patches in their skin instead of eyeballs, or about lower mammals whose species can’t see colors yet. ANY eye is an evolutionary advantage over no eyes at all, even if it’s only a light-sensing patch.

The main thing is that to be scientific, you have to be willing to change your theory to match what you observe. It’s not enough for some scientist to tell you “THIS IS TRUE.” You get to go out and prove it for yourself – or even disprove it! Anybody who doesn’t let you question their theory is trying to control your mind. And that, my young friend, is politics.

Darwin loves you, man.

Technorati: Charles+Darwin evolution LaMarck Galagapos+Island Origin+of+Species acquired+traits mutations natural+selection Gregor+Mendel genetics scientific+theory

In WWII the Germans ran into Russia killing everyone they found. They destroyed entire villages, an entire way of life. In some parts of Russia 1 in 4 people died. Every family was affected.

However, the Germans awakened a sleeping giant. And when U.S. General George Patton realized just how big Russia was, he wanted our army to march right through Germany and into Russia to get at them while they were still recovering from Germany’s predations. There was a big antisemitic component to this that I don’t wish to go into at this time.

Remember that at the same time we were taking back Europe, we were also fighting in the Pacific theater. Japan was throwing Mitsubishi Zeros at us – yup, made by the same company that makes cars and Three Diamonds tuna. The kamakazi pilots literally committed suicide by ramming our ships with planes. They had already been at war with China for years before Pearl Harbor and they were pretty much tapped out.

Kamakazi means “divine wind” after a Chinese attack that was thwarted by high winds in the Sea of Japan.

Despite the fact that we had pretty much won against Japan, in 1949 we dropped atomic bombs on two important cities. Not on the Mitsubishi plant where Zeros were manufactured but a few miles away on a city full of civilians.

Why???

To impress the Russians that we were technologically superior.

The Russians hurried up to create their own atomic bomb. We upgraded to hydrogen bombs, which use an atomic bomb as an igniter. Russia upgraded.

The government created a big Communism scare to get the American people to fund this massive effort. We used smaller nations as proxies to test our technology against other countries that acted as Russia’s proxies.

We engaged in a “space race” that started with Russia’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and culminated in our first steps on the moon in 1969.

Both of us developed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems (ICBMs) to deliver nukes. We both developed sophisticated anti-nuke systems to shoot down ICBMs. We had enough missiles to destroy each other 30 times over – this is called “overkill.”

In 1962, JFK had a standoff with Russia’s Khrushchev over missile sites in Cuba, just 90 miles away from the US. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest we ever came to Thermonuclear Armageddon.

In the 1980′s President Reagan wanted to fill the sky with killer satellites. My favorite idea was “Rods of God,” in which satellites would carry up huge titanium rods that they could drop out of the sky on our enemies. These people were so wrapped up in it that they’d destroy the world if they had to.

Needless to say, we had a worldwide spy network to keep tabs on all this.

Fortunately for us, and devastatingly for the citizens of the USSR, they ran out of money before we did. I guess that means we won, but winning put the US so far in debt to foreign investors that we’ll still be paying it for another generation.

War, even a Cold War, is expensive.

That’s the cold war, the technological rivalry. We never actually fired a shot at each other, but we spent 40 years trying to prove our cajones were bigger than theirs.

Putin seems to trying to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. This time around, we’ve already thrown billions of dollars at the non-war in the Middle East and it is crumbling our economy. I don’t know where it will go.

Technorati: Kamakazi divine+wind Mitsubishi+Zero Three+Diamonds WWI atomic+bomb cold+war Nazi General+Patton Hiroshima Nagasaki sputnik Intercontinental+Ballistic+Missile ICBM communism+scare space+race Soviet+Union

Ancient devil frog may have eaten baby dinosaurs | U.S. | Reuters

Beelzebufo ampinga was a frog that lived in Madagascar 70 million years ago. At 16 inches long and weighing in at an estimated 10 pounds, this bad boy was so mean he may have fed on newly-hatched dinosaurs.

The largest living frog species is the goliath frog of West Africa, a mere 12.5 inches long and 7.2 pounds.

Graphic by Kazvorpal.

Paleontologist David Krause of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, is one of the scientists who discovered the bones in 1993. They pieced together Beelzebufo’s skeleton and recently published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Beelzebufo took down lizards and mammals and smaller frogs, and even — considering its size — possibly hatchling dinosaurs,” Krause said in a telephone interview.

Beelzebufo has some modern relatives in South America, more evidence supporting the theory that there may once have been a land bridge linking Madagascar to Antarctica and South America. These relatives, the Argentine Horned Frog, are nicknamed the “PacMan Toad” because of the size of their mouths and the way they hunt.

Recently an acquaintance tried to convince me that the Witch Trials were totally due to social forces. Of course there were social forces at work, but in the end the Evils that occurred during that time frame were the final chapter in the Church’s 600-year war on Serpent Knowledge. She had been completely blinded to some very important concepts.

First, this was Christians murdering people, not “social forces” in the abstract. Read the Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous “Hammer of Witches” that the Inquisitors used to determine whether a person was a witch and what to do when the Inquisitors found out they were. It was written by two Dominican priests.

In predomininantly Catholic areas, the Inquisitors killed Protestants. In countries that were about equally Catholic and Protestant, they killed Jews. There was a huge collaboration between kings and the Church to get rid of anyone who was inconvenient. This is a good argument for the separation of church and state.

The witchcraft scare followed 600 years of torture and murder in the name of Love. You’ve probably heard of the Inquisition. It wasn’t until around the 16th century that they were burning more witches than heretics.

England was Anglican by the time the witch-burnings rolled around, by the way.

The first victims of the Inquisition were not witches but scientists, usually Christian. The Inquisition was used to suppress scientific advancement. Church dogma mandated belief in a flat earth and in Creationism. Galileo Galilei, the famous Italian astronomer and physicist, was one of those tried for heresy. He recanted his scientific views in order to avoid being murdered by his own Church.

The Pope issued an apology in 2002 for “errors of his church for the last 2000 years.” So, yes, religion was an important part of it.

A lot of cultists are re-writing history, probably in preparation for a new generation of Inquisitors. Next they’ll be burning the Harry Potter books.

As for the social forces, the switch from heresy to witchcraft started with some cults with strict behavioral requirements. They used the witchcraft accusation to get rid of people who didn’t meet their prudish standards, then started throwing in dissidents, subversive herbalists and the occasional adulterer just for kicks. Fortunately there was already a tradition of torture and murder so they hitched a ride on that.

There’s an interesting article about misogeny and homophobia and witch burning called “The Kindling Effect.” It explains why we call homosexuals “bundles of sticks.”

Technorati: Witch+Trials social+forces Hammer+of+Witches Catholic heretics Creationism Galileo The+Pope homophobia faggot

I’ve been thinking about parasites.

Not the “earworm” sort of thing where you hear a bit of a song and can’t get it out of your head for the rest of the day. Not even the everyday suck-on-your-intestines nasties. I’m thinking about the kind of parasites that get into your mind and control your thoughts and actions.

For the record, I know *of* these parasites but I’m looking up the names online as I go along. Damn it, Jim, I’m an engineer not a biologist.

The sensitive and the squeamish may want to stop reading this now.

Really.

Ok, now that we’ve shaken off the fleas…

There’s a parasite that infects rodents, Toxoplasm gondii. It makes them all hyper and weird and THAT makes them easier for cats to catch. Where it gets interesting is that the life cycle of this parasite requires that it pass through the stomach and intestinal tract of… wait for it… a cat! How convenient!

I have occasionally wondered whether the active phase of the infestation makes humans more attractive to cats. Something like 40% of the population has antibodies to T. gondii. Maybe “the rat race” isn’t so far off, eh?

The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey – whose sister is or was schizophrenic and is probably somewhat affected himself – is promoting the paranoid delusion that cat shit causes schizophrenia. Is it possible that when his sister got sick he blamed Fluffy? This, my friends, is a major researcher into bipolar disorder at the prestigious Stanley Foundation. We are SO f*cked.

Oh. In other countries with the same rate of antibodies to T. gondii in the population, there is less schizophrenia and the prognosis is better. Personally I think schizophrenia is a product of industrialization and I wish Dr. Torrey would quit wasting valuable time digging in the cat box.

There are many other parasites that affect the behavior of the host. Three
more follow:

Sacculina infects crabs. If by “infects” you mean “castrates and takes over the mind and body.” This is the stuff of nightmares. Succulina injects itself into a crack in the exoskeleton and quickly grows out through the entire nervous system. Crabs that are infected can’t breed, can’t regenerate limbs, and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but feeding and caring for the parasite. They even stroke and clean the monster, which in the female crab lives in the compartment where she usually holds her unhatched eggs.

Can you imagine having some THING living inside you, changing your brain so that the thing becomes the focus of your entire life? This is the stuff of nightmares.

The lancet fluke has a fairly complicated life cycle, but the interesting part is where it infects an ant. An infected ant acts like a regular ant by day, but at night she climbs up a blade of grass and waits at the top. The next stage of the parasite’s life cycle is to become a liver fluke in a cow. How better to be eaten by a cow than to have your host sit on the top of a blade of grass at dawn!

Another fluke infects fish – the young flukes migrate to the fish’s brain and crowd around it like pigs at a trough. Fish who are infected periodically stop what they’re doing and flail about at the surface of the water. Shorebirds find the flailing fish easy to catch, and yep, the birds are part of the life cycle too. The parasites boost the bird population by making more food available, but the fact that they kill their fish hosts puts limits on how much of the fish population can be infested. Again, a very convenient situation.

Hopefully you all are getting where I’m going with this – that parasites can make you do things you might not have done if it didn’t benefit the parasite. A parasite that flat out ate us alive would be found and eradicated like the screwfly was. Most of them are merely a nuisance.

Humans are, for the most part, repulsed by parasites. I’m sure there are some parasites somewhere that are status symbols, but I sure can’t think of
any. Usually we want to avoid parasites if we can, and expel or exterminate them when we can’t.

It would be more adaptive if the parasite made humans enjoy being infested. I’ve read sci-fi stories about this sort of thing, and I remember at least one Star Trek episode where the infested feel **enriched** by the parasite and are absolutely delighted to forcefully spread it to others.

If you believe the writer William S. Bourroughs, language itself is a virus. Certainly memes, often called “mind viruses,” have some quality that helps them spread. Does anyone remember Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus” from the “Home of the Brave” video?

Oh, he did a really nice book about the co-evolution of cats and people called “The Cat Inside” or something similar. I highly recommend it for the cat-infested.

Next section of this article will be on how *ideas* influence our thinking and behavior in the same way that parasites do.

Technorati: parasites medicine medical mind schizophrenia T+gondii cat+shit William+S+Burroughs memes

The Squid and the Bus « microecos

Ok, I had to follow up my baby squid post with a link to a site that proves once and for all that everything’s scarier in Russian.

Technorati: Science squid

SkyScout

SkyScout is a digital planetarium. You point it at the sky and it identifies whatever star or other celestial object you point it at.

I…
WANT

Technorati: celestron sky+scout planetarium

I have been thinking about about the environmental and medical effects of nano-pollution. Nanotechnology is a catch-all phrase that describes microscopic man-made objects. These come in many shapes and sizes – soccer-ball-shaped cages made of 60 carbon atoms, nanotubes the thickness of a hair, among others.

These objects persist in the environment after they’ve been used and disposed of. There has been little, if any, investigation into the effects of exposure to environmental nanotechnology.

Nanotechnological pollution is on the horizon. Fortunately, at least one group is looking into it. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) is trying to put together a multi-disciplinary collaborative network to establish guidelines for safely handling nano-materials.

We don’t have very long to get the guidelines and some procedures in place. An emerging illness called Morgellons Disease is quite possibly the earliest indication of what we can all expect from nano-pollution.

“Morgellons disease” is the name given to a cluster of symptoms that includes skin lesions, often with small fibers in the lesion. Fascinating stuff. Right now the medical profession is pooh-poohing it as a symptom of mental illness – Delusional Parasitosis. The folks at the Morgellons Research Foundation have posted as much information as is available on their web site.

The medical profession as a whole is particularly unscientific when it comes to identifying and treating new illnesses. Have you noticed? You can buy a lot of time if you pass the patient off to a psychiatrist.

It is possibile that some, if not all, cases of Morgellons are the result of exposure to tiny bits of nano-technology. These objects may lodge almost invisibly in the skin, causing unexplained lesions. Larger nanotubes or groups of smaller ones may appear to be fibers. According to a recent article in Popular Science, many of these objects are so small that when inhaled they can be carried directly into the brain using the same pathways as smells do.

Reading the Morgellons information reminded me of the few times I’ve come in direct contact with fiberglass insulation. You can’t see it, but it is painful and itchy. What if the fibers were microscopic? Would they still cause discomfort? I don’t know.

The dangers of asbestos were ignored for decades while thousands of workers died of the lung cancer it is now known to cause. I hope we don’t repeat the story with BuckyBalls.


Technorati: Morgellons+Disease nano-technology nano-tubes nano-pollution asbestos nanotube+modeler buckminsterfullerene buckyballs